Pre-Seed to Series A · Early-Stage Operations
As an early stage founder, you should be spending 100% of your time building product and talking to customers. Anything else is a waste of your time. I take ops off your plate so you can focus on product and customers.
Work With MeI'm JP Smith. I've run payroll, built financial models, managed cap tables, shepherded SOC 2 audits, and owned due diligence for priced rounds — at companies from seed through Series A. I know exactly what this work is, and I know how much headspace it steals from founders when it lands on their plate.
I've been on founding teams three times: as CEO through Techstars 2018, on the founding team at Tembo (raised $20M from Venrock, GreatPoint Ventures, and others), and as an early operator at Inkeep, a YC '23 company backed by YC, Khosla, and GreatPoint Ventures.
Most of my clients come through VC referrals or founder word-of-mouth. I work with 1–2 companies at a time so the work gets done right.
01
Payroll, benefits, variable comp plans, hiring and firing, onboarding and offboarding. I handle the full employee lifecycle so you can focus on building the team, not managing the paperwork.
02
Financial modeling, bill pay, invoicing, bookkeeper management. Your finances stay clean and current without you having to think about them.
03
SOC 2, investor reporting, vendor security questionnaires, Sales & Use Tax, Federal Income Tax, R&D Tax Credits, and more. The compliance surface area at an early-stage company is enormous — I map it and manage it.
04
Cap table management, investor-ready data room, priced round due diligence, trademarks, patents, option grants, 409A valuations. I work with your counsel so you don't have to quarterback every legal workstream.
05
CRM administration, sales ops, and ownership of your company's internal systems. I'm often the admin across all tools — so everything stays connected and nothing falls through the cracks.
You're raising or just raised. You have 2–20 people. You're doing ops yourself and it's starting to hurt. That's who I work with — venture-backed founders from pre-seed through Series A, in the window where ops debt accumulates fastest and every hour you spend on it costs you the most.
I work with 1-2 companies at a time, and I respond within 24 hours. Drowning in ops? I'm the solution.